Queer Safety and Visibility
how can we as a community make trans women comfortable?
content warning: honest depictions of upsetting bigotries.
Transgender women are women. The women of women even. Perhaps the most fruitful theoretical application 1 of transgender women is as a mirror: the exploration of assumptions around transgender women leaves the explorer well-positioned to explore assumptions around women as a whole. Mostly my Substack is for investigating transgender women, and various bits of esoteric fanfiction but this particular article is for everybody else.
Sorry transgender women. You can read it too. But it probably just says things you already know, and have experienced. If nothing else it may provide you with some insight into how people raised as women often think, which I believe you may find valuable.
Anyways I was working through some differences in gendered socializations for a previous article when I ran into one of these assumptions held by most of the queer community2. I thought this particular difference would be worth explicating because it is a fundamental mismatch between the queer community at large and transgender women.
Being raised as a woman leads one to assume by default that visibility = safety.
If you were raised as a girl and live in a city, you know that a subway car full of people is much safer than a subway car with only one or two other occupants. If a man tries to grab you on the train and you shriek, you can rely on the public at large to help you out — or you know that assailants are cowards, and won’t try to take advantage of you if there are others around. If you suddenly collapse on a sidewalk, you know that the passersby are likely to help you up or ask you if you’re okay. Nights and alleyways are unsafe not just because they mean you can see less but because they mean that you can be seen less. When you see a woman in a leadership position, you feel safer in that organization — if she could do it, so could you.
When a whisper network accrues enough social capital aimed at an abuser, its members go public, relying on visibility as a means of punishment. Conversely, if you’re treated as a girl and you deviate from your assigned role, by, say, cutting your hair short, or dating girls, or not actually being a girl at all, social condemnation typically comes in the form of pretending you didn’t do any of that. “That isn’t the real you.” “That doesn’t matter.” Your visibility is punitively lowered.
This is the ancient compact of womanhood: as long as you are seen to be pretty and pleasant and compliant, you are regarded as a precious and valuable thing, and precious and valuable things are to be protected3.
For the modern woman, who understands that she must depend on herself, and that her ambition must sometimes come before her security, visibility is a demonstration of power and a necessary precondition for solidarity with her peers. Feminism requires that women connect to each other and prioritize their needs over those of men. Obviously there are exceptions: celebrity brings stalkers and public scrutiny. But for the most part women understand visibility to be a kind of shield — if not a perfect one, still better than nothing.
Queer visibility operates under these same assumptions, with the twist of solidarity. Visibility is enough of a shield that we can make a bargain, with the world and each other: we trade our some of our safety for freedom of expression. If the lesbians and the gays and the bi people and the trans people and everybody else who doesn’t quite fit into sexually normative categories all agree to stick our necks out for each other, bigots will have a harder time with all of us. When we make ourselves visible, we can show those of us who aren’t — who are living straight lives, who are hiding in the closet — that there are other ways to live. Every celebrity, co-worker, teacher, and friend who comes out demonstrates to the straight majority that queer people are their neighbors, not their enemies.
And likewise, bigots like to pretend that queer people don’t exist. Gay people are told that our sexualities are something we will repent from or grow out of; bisexuals struggle with bisexual invisibility; transgender men and nonbinary people are denied their rightful genders by (often deliberate) lack of recognition.
When they tell us we don’t exist, the correct response is to take the high ground. It should come as no surprise that queer people as a whole, as a demographic obsessed with performance, have a correspondingly excellent PR campaign. At this point, most audiences know homophobia is low-class — or they know that enough other audiences think so that the perception still affects them, which is almost as good.
Here’s the thing, though. When we make that bargain, of safety for freedom, we are declaring some amount of safety ‘worth giving up’ for our free expression. And for most of us, it is. Being closeted is corrosive to the soul in ways you can only appreciate if you’ve ever had to live inauthentically, as corny as that term sounds.
There is, however, one group under the umbrella on which Conservative parties worldwide have chosen to focus their efforts; one group set apart by the fact that this basic equation, visibility = safety, does not work for them.
I’m talking, as I so often do, about transgender women.
“Visibly gay” among lesbians4 is unambiguously a compliment; if you call a transgender woman visibly trans she will take it as an insult. The very appearance of transness is something she is trying to escape. Complicated internal discourses circulate through communities of transgender women on the matter, but it largely boils down to the fact that transgender women imagine that if they were not visibly trans their lives would be much easier.
They aren’t wrong.
One of the reasons that the safety-for-freedom trade so many gays make is a good one is that visibility works in our favor. Bigots respond differently based on how they see us. Look at Shrier’s execrable Irreversible Damage — or don’t, because you will gain nothing of value from doing so: the rhetoric employed against transgender men echoes that employed against lesbians. AFAB deviants are considered wayward children who need to be re-educated into walking wombs. Personally I would rather die. The correct response to Shrier and her ilk’s patronizing dreck is to coolly assert our independence and personhood, because they need a majority to actively do anything to us and they aren’t going to get it.
But the rhetoric employed against trans women is much more vicious. Only the youngest transfeminine adolescents are called “misguided” — against adult transgender women they do not bother with even Shrier’s facade of civility. Trans women get cut off from their lifelines, starved of resources, and killed.
We take for granted that visibility allows a sympathetic public to take action on our behalf — but trans women are not guaranteed that sympathetic public. Visibility without soft social power just makes transgender women into targets. Parades and protests and Pride raise visibility, and make it easier for gays of all kinds to come out — but for transgender women who are out, visibility can be an active hazard. This emphasis on visibility can alienate transgender women, who are often deeply insecure about their appearances in ways that take medical intervention to alleviate. As many women are! But they will judge themselves more harshly about it in a community with such an emphasis on the usage of appearance to declare ourselves.
in a righteous world, "trans investigation" would be a delight and honor. she could be discovered and recognized and given a little treat, for existing so beautifully. chasing like birdwatching. just another beautiful truth potential that transphobia has destroyed....
I’m not saying that visibility is an unambiguous negative for transgender women; as the most marginalized and most closeted group under the queer umbrella, they have a lot to gain from visibility, particularly as transition at younger ages becomes viable. What I am saying is that it is easy for more privileged demographics to forget that visibility is a double-edged sword for transgender women and we need to be relieving more of its downsides for her.
Gay men are often quietly sympathetic to transgender women here, as they experience a lesser version of this same hatred as a result of conservative revulsion for a perceived abandonment of their manhood — but gay men, as men, have kinds of social power and money that let them get past or at least mitigate the haters. Gay men are also rarely as interested in broader queer community in the same ways as gay women. Which makes sense, as they are men after all.
If we want transgender women to protest with us (as many do! Their bravery is to their credit); to feel fully safe and included; to share our lives and joys and sorrows? We must keep them safe enough that they can choose to trade off that safety for freedom. We must change the culture so that visibility means safety for them as well — only then can transgender women develop her visibility to her fullest potential.
no sarongs, no burkinis, and no little skirts. I stand for trans visibility
far more fruitful practical applications exist, of course
such as it is
and owned. Feminism 101. Awful isn’t it? fine it’s hot when women do it but I think I get a lesbian exception here
trans lesbians included. If you tell a trans lesbian that she looks gay she will vibrate a little, very cutely. She will not ask for a hug after so you should offer her one.
This is actually valuable insight into why non-trans supporters tend to try to push me to come out more publicly. Whereas I see everyone else as potential enemies, they see everyone as potential additional protection.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm halimede, and have just forgotten I wrote all this down. Love you, Hali.